The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  Alicia came into the kitchen while Margaret was putting the picnic together, came in and leaned against the kitchen counter. Margaret noticed how slender her arms were, the way she crossed those arms carelessly so that it looked like her hands only met her elbows as an afterthought.

  “Thanks,” Alicia said quietly, as if the words took tremendous effort. “It’s awfully nice of you.”

  “You and Dan should go down to Scott’s Bay and look for agates,” Margaret said, looking at her own hands as she spread the mayonnaise. “The wind’s off the water, and you’ll be cooler. Take a sweater, though, it can be foggy with the wind in this direction.” She could imagine them on the beach, both in heavy sweaters, walking slowly along the angled gravel, watching for the bright quartzes, for the agates and amethyst and the brilliant orange crystals of zeelite. Margaret hadn’t been there for years, but she could remember the narrow dirt road down to the beach, the way it ended just before the great grey dunes of small stones, the narrow, white-painted bridge, bowed up in the middle, that you walk across to get to the beach itself.

  “Tides are fast there,” Margaret said, and she could have sworn that Alicia jumped at the sound of her voice – no, not jumped, but started, perhaps, the way horses suddenly lurch away, jangled, big, smooth legs suddenly awkward and akimbo. Margaret had to resist the urge to reach out for her.

  “Sorry?” Alicia said.

  “The tides,” Margaret said slowly. “The tides are fast out there. So you have to be careful.”

  Margaret had a basket she had been saving for a picnic, a basket she had never used, and she took it down from the top of the cupboards where it had always been. She put in the sandwiches and fruit, and passed it to Alicia, and for a moment Margaret felt the cool smooth skin of Alicia’s fingers.

  “We’ll do that,” Alicia said, and even after the couple had left, Margaret could see the map she had drawn for them in her head, could imagine them driving down through Wolfville, through Canning, down to where the road began to bend around along the ocean because it had no other choice. In under the big elms that Dutch elm disease hadn’t found yet, out past the low, slow brooks where the ducks worked the muddy water, their tailfeathers upright as they dipped, head down.

  Sitting in the kitchen, she could picture the postcard-perfection of it: the fishing boats at the ends of their lead-lines, Cape Islanders all, settled hull-down into the deep red Minas Basin mud. Abandoned by the tide, waiting calmly for its resurrection. The deep green blades of dune grass, the fine-gravel beach that ran away at such a discrete angle that it looked as if it was actually level, so close to flat that the tide boiled in low and fast like one long, never-breaking shallow wave.

  Margaret could imagine the rattle of the road gravel, thrown up under the car from the dirt road, the semaphore of pings and clangs, that rare and wonderful disordered song. And she could remember how long it had been since she had been on that road, one elbow out the window in the baking sun, the hot summer vinyl seat burning the backs of her thighs, a delta of dust growing out behind the car.

  Then suddenly Alicia and Dan would take a left up the hill past the shotgun tarpaper shacks, past the mobile homes and the abandoned pickup trucks, onto the marginal ground where the orchards were scabby and stunted, short of sun. Up through where the brooks had cut deep valleys in the soft red sandstone, where the maples would change in great flaming fury in the fall, where, for a few short weeks, the leaves would be almost too bright to look at. She could imagine them holding each other’s hands, could imagine someone holding her hand.

  Then suddenly they would be thrown out into the open, heading along the spine of the hill towards Scott’s Bay. A row of abandoned, sheered-off wharf pilings, heading out into the sea below the tide line, their genesis forgotten.

  No wonder in it at all, there on the narrow grey-black strip of asphalt through the head-high alders, no wonder save for the sudden discovery of the huge broad grey crescent of beach stone. No wonder except for the fact that, on hands and knees, the gravel is filled with scores of semi-precious stones, and occasionally, very occasionally, the strangely milky swirl of a lonely teardrop opal.

  Alicia brought the basket back empty, and smiled.

  “Thanks,” she said. “The beach was wonderful.”

  But this was nothing Margaret didn’t already know.

  Later, when it began to get dark, the heat began to fall off the day. It fell away in sheets with the setting sun: one moment, as heavy and oppressive and damp as sweat; the next, the cool of sudden evening wind, gathering and racing out from under the trees where it had been sheltering, biding time.

  Margaret sat on the steps of the back porch, feet apart, watching the sky wash through orange to black. She shook a cigarette out of the pack, but this one she smoked slowly, drawing the smoke in and holding it for a moment before exhaling.

  It was almost completely dark when the door to the Forrestal cabin opened. She watched, still smoking, as Dan came out on the porch and stretched. She inhaled, saw him stop and stare towards her, towards the suddenly-bright coal at the end of her cigarette. He started walking towards her, hands in his pockets.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said when he reached the bottom of the steps. He pointed towards the cigarette. “Got another?” Margaret nodded, knowing Dan could barely see her in the gloom. She shook out a cigarette, passed it to him, and reached over with hers. He lit his and sat on the steps. Margaret leaned forward and rested her forearms on her knees. They sat quietly for a few moments.

  “Don’t smoke that much anymore,” Dan said. “Especially in front of Alicia.”

  “She knows anyway,” Margaret said, knowing the way Jack would sometimes wrinkle up his forehead and nose when he came into the kitchen, even though she always smoked outside.

  “Yeah, well, she pretends she doesn’t. And I pretend I don’t smoke,” he said. “It’s a relationship built on mutual denial.”

  They sat quietly, looking across the stubbled grass as car headlights swept down the road. The night insects were singing, and from the standing water behind the house, there were the high trilling peeps of small green frogs.

  “It’s hard not to love it here,” Dan said, breathing out smoke. The air was so still that it seemed to hum, to vibrate in the darkness.

  “Can’t stand it here any more,” Margaret said. “Even quiet can crush you.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Dan said. “I can’t believe that you don’t like it. I would.”

  “Yeah, well, then I’ll pretend I do. And you can pretend to believe me, and we can build something mutual on that,” Margaret said.

  Margaret thought she saw the white flash of his teeth against his face for a moment, but in the dark she wasn’t sure. He flicked the cigarette away, and they watched its ember tumble end over end away onto the driveway. Her cigarette landed along the edge of the grass.

  She watched hers smouldering in the short grass, and knew she’d be the one to come out and collect both of the cold, charred filters in the early morning.

  “Gotta get back,” Dan said, standing up and hitching his jeans up around his hips. She watched him walk away.

  She stayed outside until the dew suddenly fell, until the night was cooler and there were tiny water droplets all over the painted steps, and the whole time the cars kept swinging by the gentle curve in the road out in front of her, kept swinging by, heading for somewhere more interesting.

  Margaret could see them through the yellow-lit windows of their cabin, and Dan was standing behind her, behind Alicia, with his arms around her waist. Then his hands were under her shirt and Alicia was leaning back, pushing against him and Margaret looked away again, down towards the road.

  The Forrestals left the next morning around eleven, and Margaret left the keys and the credit card slip on the table, as if they might change their minds. The dew was already long gone, the air already heavy again.

  And Jack was on the tractor, hauling the big mower up and down
the long field between the house and the road, the chaff and dust rising in a cloud behind him. Looking out the kitchen window, she could only see his back and the back of his head, and the deep, dusty vee of sweat down the middle of the back of his t-shirt as he drove away from her. His head didn’t move, as if he were completely consumed with the task at hand, as if he could not imagine that there was anything on earth, not one single thing anywhere, beyond grass and hoppers and dust.

  Alicia gave an offhand wave as the car pulled around the corner of the house and headed down the driveway. Dan was looking straight ahead at the road, and he didn’t turn his head, not even once. Margaret would have noticed if he had.

  “Oh,” she moaned to the blind pane of kitchen window glass, to the rooster-tail of roadway dust settling behind the car as it pulled away. “Oh.” And Margaret put her forehead against the glass and cried.

  Housekeeping

  IAN KINLEY ARRIVED AT THE SEASHELL MOTEL in a taxi, and that was strange enough.

  Settled down on the side of a highway outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Seashell was the kind of crumbling motel where you drove in one night, and drove out the next morning.

  And that was the second strange thing: Ian wasn’t leaving in the morning.

  When the clerk asked him “Just tonight?” Ian answered “We’ll see,” all the time tapping the edge of his credit card impatiently on the counter.

  “Licence number?”

  “Nope. No car.”

  “Bags?”

  “Just this,” and Ian held up a small brown fabric suitcase.

  “Unit 14,” the desk clerk said. The new guest was a small man, maybe in his seventies, with a thin, deeply wrinkled face and white hair. He was wearing a brown jacket and dress pants, much more formal than most guests, who favoured t-shirts, jeans and baseball caps.

  Ian walked slowly to his unit, stopping occasionally to breathe deeply and painfully. His doctor had said it was only pleurisy, but Ian thought of it – repeatedly – as the last straw. The pace gave him a chance to look at the units carefully. Each one was the same. Except for the corner units, they shared common walls on both sides, and uniform, greying white stucco on the front. Each had two rectangular windows – one large, one small – underlined with once-jaunty window boxes full of dead or dying flowers. The geraniums were struggling – the pansies had long since died of thirst. There was a parking space in front of each one, with a white number painted on the pavement.

  Ian watched the numbers as he walked: eleven, twelve, fourteen. He always found that odd: it was like buildings where there was no thirteenth floor, where the elevator buttons left out one odd number as they climbed. Perhaps the idea was that superstition would make them hard to rent, he thought. But he was pragmatic enough about that: he’d be fine staying in thirteen, whatever they decided to call it.

  Inside, the room was like any other – two queen-sized beds with busily patterned bedspreads designed to hide stains, a television with the remote control laid squarely in front of it. He’d turned down the minibar key. He laid his suitcase on the bed near the window, and walked into the bathroom, flicking on the light. The bathroom, he knew, would back onto another bathroom in the suite next door – another way to save a little money on construction.

  Ian looked at himself in the big bathroom mirror, trying to reconcile the person looking back at him with the picture he had of himself. The man in the mirror shook his head resignedly. Ian walked back to the bed and opened the suitcase. Socks, underwear, one clean shirt. He picked up two handfuls of pill bottles, his razor and toothbrush, and went back to the bathroom. He lined the bottles up in front of the glass, next to the two clean, upside-down water glasses.

  Doctors like to have you out of their office, he thought. They like to think they’ve done the right thing, but they also like to be rid of you, rid of your nagging complaints. Old age complaints, he thought, regularly mitigated but never cured.

  If you’re in your seventies, just go in and tell them you’re having trouble sleeping, and they’ll get the prescription pad out right away.

  Ian looked at the five bottles of pills sitting next to each other. Four to keep me alive, he thought, and one to do something quite different. One to keep his blood thin, one to keep his blood pressure down, another for angina, a fourth, antibiotics for his lungs. And the sleeping pills.

  Ian had never had trouble sleeping – nightmares, yes, but sleep had always been like falling off a bridge. A few seconds to ponder the day before you hit the black water of sleep hard. But he had forty sleeping pills now, big red and yellow capsules, each one, the doctor had assured him “strong enough to put a horse to sleep.”

  He left the bathroom, pulled the curtains open.

  His room looked out on the parking lot, and across the road, a lobster pound where the overnight refrigerated trucks sat, engines running, waiting for morning and loads of crustaceans. Right in front of his unit in the empty parking space was a huge stain of transmission fluid. Later, when it rained, the pavement there would bead up with shiny, oil-topped drops, each with its own twirling, circling rainbow. The drops dried last, long after the rest of the asphalt had lightened.

  Ian met Rosie the afternoon he checked in: he was coming out the door of his unit while she was coming in, the bulky housekeeping cart blocking most of the sidewalk.

  Rosie Kirk had dark eyebrows that knotted together constantly, as if she were overwhelmingly concerned. They were at odds with the rest of her wide, open face – Ian noticed that she always smiled when she met someone, as if she felt she owed them a pleasant response. Big across the shoulders, she looked more like a softball player than anything else, and a cheerful one at that. But the eyebrows gave her away, put the lie to the smile.

  “Just checking to see if everything’s all right,” Rosie said brightly. Ian had yet to even pull back the covers on the bed to see what the pillows were like. If I dropped my things back in the suitcase, he thought, there’d be no sign I’d been here at all. But that’s the way it is with hotels; check in, check out, and vanish without a trace.

  “It’s fine,” Ian said, smiling back at Rosie. “All I really need.”

  At the same time, he wished he hadn’t run into the woman. It was too much to put a face to her – he couldn’t help imagining, now, what it would be like when Rosie came into the room afterwards. But that was another day, and Ian suddenly realized how hungry he was.

  OUTSIDE THE MOTEL, he set off down the road, walking on the gravel shoulder, teetering slightly. The ditches were alight with flowers – there were still wild strawberries, he saw, even though he didn’t bend down to pick any. Wild strawberries and the bright green of raspberry canes. The tangled strands of wild roses, the flowers still tightly-furled and pink-tipped. Trash in the ditch, too, and Ian couldn’t help but try to put together a sort of history for each piece. All stories, he thought, from the candy wrapper some child had dropped out of a car window, to the ripped condom package, its torn edge fluttering in the breeze, to the way the beige timothy grass seeds were coming away from their stalks. That was the one part he regretted: such a waste to collect so much information, so much experience, only to have it turn off like a light bulb.

  Sure, the practical stuff carried on – he knew there wasn’t anyone who needed to hear from him about how to wire a three-phase electrical plug, or what kind of varnish was right for trim. But there had to be some use for and some way to share the other stuff: the knowledge that the searing part of love can be fleeting, and should be carefully savoured for as long as possible; that wine tastes different in the dark; that every chance you take is electric in its own way, and that its charged tingle is far from unpleasant.

  He was at his destination already. In front of him was the sign for the restaurant, an oval sign lined all around with light bulbs: Mae’s. It was a small restaurant with booths and matronly waitresses in white uniforms, a familiar kind of spot, and Ian realized you could actually see the ocean from most of the tables.


  He had a simple meal, clam chowder and a dinner roll. The roll was warm – Ian used both of the small plastic containers of butter, and didn’t stop to think about it. He wiped the last of the chowder up with the roll, and felt a great release from doing exactly what he wanted. Then he sat quietly with his coffee – two cream, one sugar – and looked out the restaurant’s big windows, across the train tracks and out over the short-chopped waves of Bedford Basin. There was a container ship moored there, swinging on its anchors and stacked high with orange and blue containers. Ian imagined where the big metal containers were going, tried to guess what it was they held.

  Leaning back in the cushioned booth, he couldn’t remember being more comfortable. I’ll wait one more day, he thought. One more day. Nothing wrong with eating clam chowder two days in a row.

  Soon, it was five days in a row, and the staff was saying they couldn’t remember the last time a guest had stayed so long. Ian was almost a fixture by then, walking down the road on rainy days, sitting by the pool when it was sunny. He had convinced the taxi company to deliver beer right to his unit, the driver always careful to look both ways, up and down the highway, before getting out of the taxi with the six-pack.

  By Wednesday, six days and counting, it looked like he might not ever leave.

  That afternoon, in the early July heat, the desk-clerk – his real name was Doug, but by then Ian knew everyone called him Bud – was swinging a hockey stick through the grass behind the motel, taking the heads off dandelions and knocking them away across the grass. Bumblebees were droning slowly in circles, and Bud was taking his time. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Bud knew no one would be checking in for hours – it would be five o’clock at the earliest when the first of the exhausted all-day drivers would flop their chubby forearms down on the counter and tug wallets out of their too-tight jeans.

  Ian watched the heat shimmer up off the pool deck, and reached into the box for another beer.